Japan’s quest for a rules-based international order: the Japan-US alliance and the decline of US liberal hegemony

Abstract

The decline of US liberal hegemony raises the following questions for Japan: What is Japan's vision of international order and strategy? How does the Japan-US alliance influence Japan's vision? Some have argued that Japan is reactive and lacks a strategy, whereas others have claimed that the country has pragmatically pursued its interests within the given circumstances. This paper argues that Japan has maintained its own vision and strategies since the Cold War. Also, in the 2010s, Japan's diplomatic tradition was updated to focus on actively shaping the Asia-Pacific region. Japan seeks to preserve existing liberal international (rather than domestic) rules; however, its method is classical as it includes a balance-of-power approach involving military expansion and alliances, and a diplomatic approach to making agreements with a variety of political regimes, whether democratic or authoritarian, including China. I call this emerging vision in Japan a 'rules-based order'.

Pursuit of Autonomy: An Assessment of Japan’s Latent Counterspace Capabilities

“…The Abe administration has been said to have ‘sought to craft new compromises on the parameters of acceptable state behaviour, including in the area of arms export policies’ (Sakaki & Maslow, 2020, p. 650). Several studies have pointed out Japan’s shift towards autonomous and assertive military policies, whereas several others have identified the country to be following a pragmatically grounded approach to attaining its economic and security goals (Tamaki, 2020).…”

Regional powers and the politics of scale

“…There has been a steady rise of challenges for Japanese diplomacy, such as the emergence of China as a superpower, the rapid progress of the North Korean nuclear program, and the shifts in American policy in the region. Observers have illustrated how these security challenges provoked a re-evaluation of Japanese foreign policy into a 'new' form and have used terms such as 'normalization' and 'security renaissance' to define the profound changes the country has undertaken, such as building up its defence capabilities, revisiting regional alliances, and building new ones including the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (see, for example, Izumikawa 2020, O'Shea and Maslow 2020; Tamaki 2020, Hosoya 2019, Dobson 2017kolmas 2021).…”

Value Politics in Japan and Europe

“…The EU, is commonly described as a "normative" (Manners, 2002), "soft" (Nye, 2004), "transformative" (Grabbe, 2005), or "civilian" (Telò, 2006) power. In the same way, Japan is framed as a prominent advocate of human rights and especially "human security" (Tanke, 2021); an "adaptative state" prioritizing "pragmatic liberalism" (Berger, 2007) ; an ardent supporter of a 'rules-based order' (Tamaki, 2020); a country turning pacificism and anti-militarism into diplomatic assets to inverse historical stigmas after WW2 (Hagström, 2016); as well as an increasingly successful international actor developing a 'grand strategy' pushed by Shinzo Abe (Hughes, Patalano, and Ward, 2021) to maximise its national interests. Japan has been enhanced as a technological leader, a development model and a focus of cultural attraction that enjoys an influence going well beyond its resources of "hard power".…”